hard drive larger than stated?

Unlike may queries about hard drive space being less than stated, I appear to have the opposite situation.
PC was purchased with a single WD 320GB SATA II drive. I partitioned with Acronis Disk Director which shows a total 298GB, with no unallocated space.
Currently am using Disk Management to set up a new second SATA drive (non-RAID) , and noted that the original drive is stated to have 187GB of unallocated space, and the total disk size is given as 483GB.
The drive case itself is labelled as 320GB and shows up in the BIOS as that size.
Is it possible that Disk Management is miscalling the true drive size, and is "seeing" unallocated space which does not exist?
Sincere thanks for your thoughts on yet another Windows mystery.

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

Personally I would reckon that your partition table is messed up. But it is probably dangerous to do anything about it unless you're willing to back everything up, rebuild the hard disk, and use the Microsoft utility to repartition the disk again... Sleeping dogs, and all that!

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

Where did that graphic come from? It doesn't look like either my Windows disk management screen or my Acronis Disk Director screen. Can you post an attachment that show BOTH drives in Disk Director, please? I'm wondering what your machine's BIOS says about the two drives, i.e. does it report their "specs" correctly?

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

> If the partition table is messed up, then it will probably eventually bite where it hurts.

I don't see why that should be the case, since the partition table doesn't get changed unless you ask for it to be changed. The boot operation seems to work fine, and Disk Manager is simply reporting incorrect settings.

Admittedly the situation is not ideal, but the only practical way out is as I suggested earlier. Unless there is something clever that rewrites the disk partition table to what it ought to be! <img src=/S/crossfingers.gif border=0 alt=crossfingers width=17 height=16>

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

Thanks to all for your responses- the thought of a problem waiting to bite is what initiated my query.
Drive 1 was installed yesterday - partitioned with Acronis but currently empty (will I install Vista as a dual-boot or leave well alone?).
BIOS shows both drives as having 320GB capacity.
The image I sent yesterday is from Windows Disk Management tool. Running Windows XP Pro SP2.
Have attached images of both drives from Windows Disk Management and Acronis - the latter shows the true situation ( or so I would like to believe)

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

Aha, just as I hoped. Given that the BIOS is correctly reporting the two drives and DD shows what looks like correct images, I think it's a "fluke." Maybe when you inserted this new drive, Windows got itself a little "confused" and will eventually pop back into shape. I know it's a pain with all those drive letters, but I would do a chkdsk x: /f (where x is the drive letter) to see if the integrity seems OK. I'd be watching for reported bad sectors as well as mal-aligned data.

Re: hard drive larger than stated?

Thank you! Will do the thorough check- it's well worth the time spent.
I ran the Western Digital diagnostics on the whole drive, and the quick tests shows no problems. Will run the extended test shortly.
Because I rely on DD for drive management, I hadn't looked at Windows disk management on this machine before installing the second drive, so don't know whether the "mistake" pre-existed its installation.